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Not sure if this is better for SQS but - What is the steelman argument against vegetarianism/veganism? I am especially interested in claims that aren't health-based, as I know quite a few very intelligent and well-sourced vegans who have thoroughly convinced me that most health based claims are false.
I'm not a vegetarian myself but I'm reasonably convinced that I should be one, it's more of a moral failing on my part that I eat meat, not a logical stance.
On the one hand it is naturalistic fallacy, on the other... its just true:
Animals eat other animals in nature. Some animals are obligate carnivores, in fact. This doesn't automatically grant license for humans to eat animals, but it does mean that eating animal meat, as a bare act, can't be wrong strictly speaking. I would proffer that the factor we care about is the suffering of the animals, and then the question is how we weight said suffering.
I weight animal suffering less than human suffering. I would gladly torture and/or kill a cow to avoid a human being tortured and killed. When we get to chickens, I weight them so little that it begins to round towards zero. And fish? Man. I cannot bring myself to care one iota about the suffering of fish. Maybe that's a moral failing but in a pure thought experiment environment, I would torture and kill a quadrillion fish before I considered doing so to a human.
Its at the level of chickens and above, then, where I actually try and calibrate my feelings on animal suffering.
From a suffering standpoint, I honestly don't know whether a chicken's life could be considered 'better' if it was lived in a state of nature, where it has to locate its own food and fight off predators and could live a long life OR be brutally slain by an unseen predator very early... compared to living life on a farm where food is plentiful and predators are few, but its life is of a set length and ends abruptly on that schedule. I'm not completely certain that the chicken itself can tell the difference.
With that said, I can accept that a factory farm where chickens are hemmed in extremely close quarters, with overheating and wallowing in their own excrement and the corpses of their fellows will produce more stress/suffering than the free-range equivalent situation, so however slight it might be, factory farms are more morally objectionable than free range or other 'humane' options.
So where do I come out? Well, I choose to believe that the suffering chickens endure in their life is ultimately worth less than the pleasure I receive from consuming them, even in the worst case scenarios. I am quite confident of this.
I am less confident of this when it comes to cows, and I get extremely leery of it when it comes to pigs. In any event, if you can get chicken meat to grow on trees, with a similar taste and nutritional profile, I will gladly switch over.
So with all that said, I think the burden that Vegetarians have to overcome to convince me, personally, of the moral worth of animal lives is to explain why the life of a chicken, a cow, or a pig has worth above and beyond it's ability to provide sustenance to humans, and quantify that rigorously enough to show that outweighs the happiness of the humans that eat them.
And do so without running into 'weird' conclusions where it becomes our responsibility not just to not eat cows, but to ensure that as many cows are brought into existence as possible and their lives are made as comfortable as possible (shoutout to Hinduism). Seriously, though. If we put sufficient weight on avoiding animal suffering, explain to me how we aren't then obligated to just drop all other priorities and save and enrich as many animal lives as possible, so long as it doesn't cause a substantial increase in human suffering. I genuinely think some vegetarians/vegans think that way, and the worst of them honestly don't care much about the human suffering. But that's not an argument.
Because I suspect that if we decided that domestic cows were no longer morally acceptable to eat, then they would likely go extinct. Unless it is morally fine to keep them as pets, which I suspect the most ardent vegetarians would object to as well. And I really don't see how going extinct is a better outcome, from the cows' perspective, than being raised for slaughter.
So yeah, eating animals is an unavoidable fact in nature. Humans have the tech and moral conscience to improve on nature, and eventually there may come an inflection point where tech enables us to produce meat without animal suffering, and in that sense obligates us to do so. But in the abstract, animal deaths don't seem to carry much moral weight, and as long as we avoid intentionally inflicting animal suffering, I will continue to argue that raising and killing animals for food is a morally acceptable act, even if it is not a righteous one.
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